What are your buyer personas, and why should you care?
ROI – It’s all about being in the right place, at the right time, with the right message.

When I ask clients, especially start-ups, their buyer personas breakout, I’m often greeted with general answers (“everyone”) or a blank stare. To try and drag this info out of them is like watching a sloth. They just want to either jump straight to tactics or add content marketing to their strategy and check it off the box. They don’t want to get bogged down in the details. But, if this step is skipped, your marketing efforts, not just content marketing efforts will be an epic failure. Suffice to say, if they aren’t cooperative, then you must emphasize you will fail, and be willing to walk away from them, if they are not willing to go through this exercise. YES, it’s that important!

Buyer personas don’t just  simply help you better understand your ideal buyer, they set-up the entire road map of how all marketing efforts will target your buying audience. When you define your target audience(s), you are able to better define your value props, differentiators and most importantly your messaging for EACH persona. This will also hone your marketing investment efforts, channels and SEO focus. Let’s say you’re a B2B business targeting two different industry verticals. Based on the results of each B2B buyer persona, your content strategy, and messages for each industry could be polar opposite. GET IT? Same story for B2C personas. And what you may uncover might surprise you and reveal a marketing approach you hadn’t considered before.

Defining your buyer personas doesn’t have to be tedious. Just follow the the map below, and you should be all set. There is also fantastic buyer persona step-by-step wizard   Make My Buyer Persona Tool on Hubspot for B2B.

DO NOT DEVELOP A B2B PERSONA USING THE B2C MODEL

Consider the two buyer persona types: B2B and B2C.  The demographic breakout for B2B doesn’t include race, marital status or level of education, among others. You can review the B2B vs B2C buyer persona breakout graphic below for a quick reference.

B2B and B2C Buy Persona Checklist

 

Buyer Persona Takeaways and Your ROI

According to Serious Decisions, a B-to-B research and advisory company,  OVER HALF of B2B marketing organizations admit that they don’t  understand their customers. The other half, have performed the exercise, but don’t know how to implement and leverage what they’ve learned.

Let me make this simple. It’s all about ROI

Here are just a few stats of how defining your B2B personas can help your with your marketing messages led to a higher ROI (Cintell).

Persona-based marketing messaging 

  • Best practice demand creation strategy that includes more personalized and customized messaging built on personas yields two times the average sales pipeline. (SiriusDecisions)
  • Engages buyer earlier and more effectively
  • Focuses messaging; increases precision of targeting
  • Instills shared understanding between marketing, sales and product
  • Improves sales productivity
  • Transforms marketers into subject matter experts on their buyers
  • 90% of companies using Personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of who buyers are. (ITSMA)
  • 82% of companies using Personas have managed to create an improved value proposition. (ITSMA)

Results:

New product launches:

  • Ex: $1B+ Global Workforce Management Software saw 28% higher campaign response rate (SiriusDecisions)
  • Ex: Adobe saw a 10% increase in email orders, a decrease of 78% in time to market, 59% increase in web visitors and 53% increase in web revenue with persona-based launch (SiriusDecisions)

Online / digital marketing improvements:

  • Persona-based website saw 210% increase in website traffic, 97% increase in website generated leads, 124% increase in website generated sales (MarketingSherpa)
  • 100% higher content downloads from Web site, 10-25% increase in marketing-influenced revenue (MarketingSherpa)
  • Online marketing generated opportunities increased by 73% with persona-based content approach (MarketingSherpa)
  • Online search traffic increased by 55% (MarketingSherpa)